Women of the Trade

Women of the Trade (W. W. Norton & Company, Forthcoming) reorients our understanding of the British Atlantic slave trade by telling the story through the lives and experiences of English, African, and Afro-English women, free and captive. This will be the first book to conceptualize the British slave trade from an entirely female vantage point covering commercial activities on three continents.

So much of what we know about the British slave trade highlights the experiences of men who involved in every node of the so-called triangular trade. The history of this trade is rarely about women. It is often a history of abstraction. The anonymous captives that Englishmen sold and transported. The millions of nameless Africans who died during their captivity or those shipped barely living to the British colonies across the Atlantic. In many respects, this abstraction cuts both ways. The scores of faceless Englishmen who loaded goods onto slave ships in British port cities like Liverpool, London, and Bristol and those employed aboard those vessels. The traders who bartered British goods for captives on the West African coast. The unnamed British subjects who bought those African men, women, and children after they disembarked from slave ships in the Caribbean and British North American colonies. The levers of the trade seem to move by themselves.

Yet this business of bartering and buying African women, men, and children was dependent upon many seemingly anonymous individuals whose names are known to us, and many of them were women. English women sold the goods and provided the services that proved crucial to successful slave trading. English women participated in almost every documented aspect of Britain’s slave trade commerce. They bought shares of slave trading companies like the Royal African Company. They owned slave ships. They were “she-merchants” who sold goods and services to slave shipowners who were “outfitting” or provisioning their vessels in preparation for voyages to West Africa, where they would buy captives and other commodities. They also sold the kinds of goods and supplies that captains and crews needed to survive their time onboard slave ships for weeks and often months at a time. And when British slave ships returned to the ports of Liverpool, London, and Bristol, English women bought the other commodities those vessels brought home.

Perhaps more surprisingly, English women left the only places they called home to settle in forts and castles that dotted the West African coastline throughout the slave trade era. They did not do so as Christian missionaries or agents of conquest and imperialism as they would a century or more later on the continent. They settled in West Africa because their husbands, fathers, and brothers did and because the region presented opportunities that they could not find at home.

This book is also about African-descended women and girls; those enslaved, those born into politically well-connected trading families, and those who birthed the Afro-English daughters of ambitious Englishmen who served as officers in the Royal African Company’s service.

Women of the Trade presents a different “New World” to readers, one which the Atlantic slave trade made possible. It reveals a world in which English and African-descended women, free and enslaved, were fundamental, one where their financial investments and support, their strategies and political maneuvering, their labor and commercial savvy, their love, and their resistance proved crucial. In many ways, then, Women of the Trade illuminates a New World that women made.